We recently connected with LaRonda Gardner Middlemiss and have shared our conversation below.

LaRonda, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

When I became a mom, my husband and I introduced books very early on to our son. There were many options, even books for the tiniest hands providing sensory input through touching, sound and sight. My son loved books! I think this is in no small part from us performing picture books for him, making story time as fun and engaging as possible. Through this experience, I’ve become fascinated with children’s literature, especially picture books. While I do enjoy reading middle grade and YA, picture books are my favorite.  
So much a favorite that one day, seemingly out of nowhere, I was inspired to write stories of my own. While cleaning the house, I was thinking about my son and his identity, having a black and white parent. I found myself thinking about how important it is for him to see himself reflected in the stories he reads – but then the options were few. I thought about how planting positive seeds of his racial identity is important at an early age. How loving and believing in himself is critical, and how ideal it would be to provide him, and other children, words of self-affirmation through picture books. Beyond his racial identity, I began to think about my son’s diagnosis and how rare it is to find a main character in books with Down syndrome. I realized that, despite all the wonderful, colorful and different stories out there, there is room to make the landscape a bit richer by sharing more stories that feature children from beyond the margins. A child with Down syndrome is still a child who learns, plays, explores and overcomes challenges; with all the silliness, joy, tears, mischief and stubbornness you can see in every child.
 
Letting less-seen kids see themselves on the pages of a book featuring them, not as a spectacle, but as kids experiencing life, having fun, upsets, victories and overcoming challenges, is vital. Sometimes things may look a little different, but what connects them is, like all kids, they are learning, growing and seeking adventure.

While I’m still on the path to fully realizing this particular vision in publication, my son lives in my stories, regardless of whether he physically shows up, because at their core, my stories have themes aligned with being true to oneself, letting your light shine, and pushing beyond any self-imposed or societal limits placed on you.

LaRonda, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am the author of I Love Me! (Beaming Books, 2020) and Do You See Me? (Roaring Brook Press, 2026). I also illustrated Meet Freida Amenze Friday by Doris Imahiyerobo-Umoinyang (Clear Fork Publishing 2025). As mentioned, motherhood gifted me this creative journey. My son’s love of story time immersed me in the wonderful world of picture books. Enjoying books with various themes and approaches to storytelling, from the quirky to the quiet, inspired me to begin writing my own stories as well as creative expression through art. When not busy battling wits with my husband or having fun with my son, I enjoy listening to children’s book themed podcasts, gaining insight from NPR, movies and binge watching series. I hope to someday both author and illustrate my own books. Books that will entertain, enlighten and empower children across the globe.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Overall, I love having an idea and working to bring it to life. Navigating problem solving when it doesn’t look or sound just the way I thought it would and the process of discovery along the way. It’s rewarding to see something that I conceptualized and created, and it’s truly fulfilling to have parents, children, teachers, caregivers, etc. connect with my work, to have them share what it means to them and how much they enjoyed it.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Prior to becoming a mom, I worked in the financial services industry at a Fortune 100 ranked company. In that life, my role was to streamline processes, improve results, and when looking at human factors, eliminate unnecessary tasks or steps. I basically needed to make sure we wasted no time, energy or resources.

So, when approaching my creative life as an aspiring picture book writer/illustrator, I found myself applying the same efficiency logic to my overall creative process. Bad idea!

As a mom of a toddler with special needs, when I thought about how much time I had to dedicate to my creative life, I couldn’t see doing anything multiple times, or at least knowingly doing something with the expectation that I would have to do it again, and possibly two or three more ‘agains’. For me, there is a curious contradiction in creating. On one hand I have the joy of creating, turning my imagination into a physical state, watching it become something that had only before existed in my mind. On the other hand, there was an anxiousness to get to the end result. And my engineering mind was telling me to streamline as many steps as possible. It told me that every move I made and everything I created needed a purpose. Whatever I created had to be used and never wasted. Otherwise, I was basically creating a re-work loop. And I had no time for that! Because honestly, I was getting my fair share of rework activity or ‘agains’ doing the day-to-day things of keeping up with my son.

Professionally, I was usually tasked with improving something that already existed. My objective was to analyze it, understand it and ultimately see how it could be made better. In those times, when I did design a process from scratch it typically involved doing a pilot (a small, controlled version of the process), to see how it worked and flowed, then analyze the results and make adjustments to iron out the kinks.

Now this is where professional and creative process could mesh nicely. Making a story is similar to designing something from scratch – or more specifically, doing a pilot. I am not sure why my brain would not allow me to see my creative life in that same way. Joining Storyteller Academy did that for me. It connected those brainwaves and gave me that revelation. For some reason, I always held engineering and creativity as two foreign and separate entities. But as I went through the lessons I began to realize that creating dummy books is like doing a pilot. The iterative process is not for naught. The steps are not unnecessary. My time and my energy are not wasted. Its purpose is in service of the story!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.iscribeisketch.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamlgmiss/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LGMissAuthor
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/laronda-gardner-middlemiss-76644766
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/IamLGMiss

Image Credits
Headshot – Neil Middlemiss
I Love Me! Book Cover – Beth Hughes
Do You See Me? Book Cover – Reggie Brown
Meet Freida Amenze Friday Book Cover – LaRonda Gardner Middlemiss
Book Signing Images – Neil Middlemiss
Storytime Images – Neil Middlemiss & Gigi’s Playhouse